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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I was born in 89, so remember a good portion of the 90s. It was a much simpler time but obviously we tend to romanticise the fun memories and quietly ignore how vastly more inconvenient daily life was.

    Mobile phones were not really a thing yet so getting in touch with your friends required a combination of patience and sheer luck.

    The internet was a different place entirely and was experienced in 30 minute chunks of time, just long enough to download a song or two before being kicked off for tying up the landline.

    Daily entertainment was 4, maybe 5 analogue TV channels, plus a collection of VHS tapes which are all degrading by constant rewatches.

    Every piece of life admin that you would normally do online today was instead done with pen and paper.

    Honestly, I’m amazed we ever got anything done.










  • I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

    What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

    And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.



  • As others have said, 100% a leak.

    I would advise to stand on a chair or stepladder underneath the ceiling and check to see if it is still level. If you see an obvious deformation around the stain, this will be being caused by water pooling on top of the ceiling plasterboard. In which case, once the leak is sorted, you will likely need to drain the pooled water, cut out the damaged section, replace it, then replaster and repaint.

    We had exactly the same issue in our last house. It was in a difficult to see spot hidden behind our kitchen cabinets. We only realised the severity of the issue when the ceiling boards gave way and fell on my head.




  • I’ve switched both my laptop and desktop over to Linux (Bazzite and Fedora respectively) in the last 6 months.

    The last time I tried to daily Linux (over a decade ago) I ended up switching back eventually, but this time I really don’t think I’ll need to. All of the games I play most often work perfectly, the dev tooling is even better than it is on Windows, and the hardware compatibility side has been completely flawless.

    Gone are the days of having to hunt down obscure Linux drivers for your touchpad or webcam. Everything just works out of the box.





  • AI is just the next level of abstraction. First there was paper tape, then assembly, then C, then C++ and then the higher level OOP languages, JavaScript, and now finally this - natural language. It’s the next logical step. And I’m sure at each previous milestone people were having arguments about it much the same as this time.

    Thing is, this is the lowest the bar has ever been to get into development - and yet, you still need to understand both what you are asking the LLM to produce and, even more importantly, the output it produces. This second part is in my opinion the most likely aspect to blow up in people’s faces.

    Don’t come crying when the mission critical finance app vibe coded by your MBA suddenly starts erroring out at 3am every second Saturday because your LLM decided to hallucinate a magic number somewhere in your codebase.


  • The main issue was a catastrophic failure of the VC_FRONT module which is one of the critical onboard computers that manages things like the 12v battery and low voltage power distribution (basically a “smart” fuse box). Without it the car is bricked and cannot be driven.

    That took several weeks and some back and forth around the extended warranty to resolve, and then even after that module was replaced, on my first drive after the repair it went straight into limp mode and then spent another week at the service centre having that diagnosed.

    During this time I decided it might be time to start looking for a new car, ended up selling it a few months later and took delivery of a new Polestar 2.